


the mirror is stealing the light to reveal us both tonight

by likewinning



Category: Friday the 13th Series (Movies), My Bloody Valentine (2009)
Genre: M/M, Mental Institutions, disturbing content etc etc, this was written 8 million years ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-02
Updated: 2009-02-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 14:33:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4266798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likewinning/pseuds/likewinning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There is one truth, for Tom: there's nothing beautiful in this place, nothing he really ever wanted to hold onto, but now there's Clay.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the mirror is stealing the light to reveal us both tonight

**Author's Note:**

> This was written forever ago after these movies came out. Any errors or typos are mine, etc etc.

_Do you look for hope in other people's eyes? Well, that may be your worst redemption. Do you feed and clothe yourself? Well, that may be your best defense._

**\- Cat Power, "Great Expectations"**

 

Things are simple here. Things are simple here, not like back home. There are hospital clothes (because Dad never visits; Tom can’t remember anymore if anyone knows where he is); there are orderlies and nurses and sometimes doctors, all wearing sleepy white and blue clothes that help keep everyone calm. And there are drugs, lots and lots of drugs. The drugs take away the years, help transition six weeks into twelve months into four years, but they never really do anything about the nightmares.

The drugs don’t take away the dreams of a masked man, of Tom’s own face behind a mask, of blood on his hands and the feeling he gets when the bodies just open up for him. Tom knows he’s supposed to tell his doctors about these dreams, but he knows he can’t take another claim of PTSD. He’s never heard of post-traumatic stress disorder making anyone else wake up hard thinking of his own friends in pools of their own blood.

So he keeps things simple, and he stays here, and years go by. Years go by, same thing day after day, drool on his chin and the psych evaluations and a buzzing in his head that says this place is a containment facility, nothing more. Everything’s the same, until the new patient shows up.

Clay shows up at the hospital two weeks after everything goes down at Crystal Lake, when he’s run clear across the country and still can’t get the image of his dead sister dead almost friends dead everyone out of his mind. It’s not his first time at one of these; running away at seventeen was just another way of saying he’d spent some time recovering from life, but this time he needs more than a rest. He smiles his way through the paperwork and shoves over the money. He sold his bike three states back, to some guy with three gold teeth and a desperate mid-life crisis look to him that Clay hopes never to experience, and that money on top of everything from his mother (the money that was supposed to be split between him and his dead sister) should keep him going here for a while. He follows two chatty nurses up three flights of stairs, and leans against the wall and takes everything in while they debate where to put him. At this point, he doesn’t care. He just wants a lock on his door and some drugs to keep him quiet.

Tom’s the youngest person on this unit. The suicidal ones, the drug addicts – the ones who seem more likely to come as soon as they go – they all end up on unit five. Here, everyone’s quiet.

Everyone’s in their own universe, their own drugs/bed/hospital food/disease, and almost everyone is old and gone in the first place. There’s only Tom, until the new guy shows up.

It’s Tuesday, game day, and Tom’s in the rec area shuffling the usual deck of forty-nine cards when they bring in the guy. They’ve taken his belt, as usual, so the guy’s jeans hang low on his slim hips while his t-shirt rides up. He leans against the wall, legs stretched out in front of him, as the nurses debate where to place him. There are no singles left; Tom snagged the last one after three years of this place, after everyone before him died or left and he gained some sick kind of seniority. The guy’s legs go on forever while the nurses have their little discussion. His hair covers his eyes while he examines his dirty sneakers, but when he looks up he catches Tom’s eye.

Clay is here to rest, to get the fuck _away_ , and he thinks at first it’ll be easy as hell – just stay on this level with the vegetables, nothing hectic like the last time. He’ll get _well_ , and nothing will be complicated. He thinks that, up until the second he gets tired of listening to the nurses and decides to take a look around, to look across the room where some guy a few years older than he is, but younger than anyone else around, deals out cards to some half-baked cronies.

The nurses see Tom, too, and one of them, Rita, walks over to him. She’s short and thin, with a beak of a nose and hair held back in a bun so tight that it makes her eyes slant. She’s been here since well before Tom arrived, and Tom wishes she’d retire already, but she’s still better than her twenty-year-old counterpart with the unbelievable rack and incomprehensibly stupid mouth. Tom smiles at Rita when she steps over, hoping that if he acknowledges her presence she won’t feel the need to put one of her bony red hands on his shoulder. She still does.

“Tom, sweetheart,” she says, vocal inflections chirping up and down like some sparrow, “there’s been a bit of a mix-up with our newest arrival. Owens was supposed to be out this week, but after his little setback -” little setback, Tom knows, meaning waking up from his usual Haldol stupor and lashing out at Justin, everyone’s favorite orderly. “Well,” Rita sighs, “we just don’t have a private room for him. We were wondering, considering the closeness in age -”

Tom isn’t listening, really. Rita has her talons on his shoulder, but his eyes stay focused on the new arrival, on the way he glances alternately at his shoes and then back at Tom, like there’s nothing and no one else in the room, no old fogies at the card table, no Matlock on TV. Every time those eyes fall on him, Tom’s breath catches and his heart races, like it hasn’t since that night in the mines.

He says, “There’s plenty of room where I am,” to Rita, and feels his lips pull into a small smile that the other guy, white front teeth gnawing on thin bottom lip, returns.

*

Clay spends most of the first day signing papers, talking to doctors, running around and answering this question and that about medication. It’s just like last time, except now Clay knows exactly what’s wrong with him. It’s just like last time, except now Clay has an eventual exit plan.

The guy runs off with the nurses shortly after Tom approves the new living situation, and Tom finishes the poker game. Most of the guys he plays with are missing most of their teeth, but Tom loses anyway, because he always shoots for the wrong pairs – he never remembers which cards are missing from the deck. He heads back to his room (their room) to wait.

He falls asleep; it’s nothing unusual, with all that they plug into his system, and in his dreams he feels his feet stomping in those boots. He looks down and sees his hand, this time, gripping the axe. He wakes with a start, heart-pounding mind-racing, until he remembers where he is (like there’s ever been anywhere else) and a voice says, “Bad dreams?”

The voice is all concern, drawling and polite, and when Tom’s eyes adjust to the light he finds a face to match the voice. Up close, he can see the mole on the guy’s chin, can see the one on each check that he could connect with a perfect diagonal line. He can see the guy’s stubble and the way that his neck, too, seems to go on forever.

“Lots of those here,” Tom grunts as he sits up. “Hope you’re a deep sleeper,” he adds.

“Not anymore,” Clay says. He hasn’t slept, in fact, in two weeks. Jason is _dead_ , they’re all dead, but he can’t even close his eyes long enough to have bad dreams. He picks his backpack off the floor and shuffles through it. From where he sits, Tom spies a few pairs of clothes, a wallet, and a few flyers that Clay shoves hurriedly into the trashcan by the bed. He offers no explanation.

“Damn,” Tom comments, ignoring all but Clay’s big big hands, “you brought even less than I did when I came here, man.”

“Yeah, well.” Clay shrugs, remembers being seventeen and showing up at a place like this with _everything_ that he could carry, remembers his roommate – the speed addict with tattooed arms and a face like a pug dog – teasing him for treating the place like a hotel. “I’m guessing most people come here in a hurry.” He shoves the hair out of his eyes, and in the light from the dying sun Tom thinks his eyes must be hazel, not the brown he thought earlier.

Tom nods. He moves so that his legs stretch out from the side of the bed. “Don’t leave that way, though.” He stands, and holds out his hand. “I’m Tom, by the way.”

“I know,” Clay says, gripping Tom’s hand. The nurse, Rita, told him about this guy. Been here four years, she said, _A nice man. I can’t imagine he’ll be here too much longer._ They release each other, but Tom steps closer. He hasn’t spoken to anyone his age in years. He’s a rare case, here, twenty-four and this particularly fucked up. He wonders what’s wrong with this guy. “Listen,” Clay says. He shoves his backpack under the bed. “Thanks for letting me share the room with you. I know in this place, it’s probably best to have a room to yourself, but…”

Clay remembers, the way the last guy ransacked his shit, the way they replaced him with one who went through every book Clay brought and highlighted any word ending in “x.” It’s not something he thinks he’ll relive here, not with the vegetables and Tom the _nice man_ , but before his mom kicked him out and sent him to one of these places, she raised him to be polite.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tom says. He feels himself smile, again, like someone doubled his dose of Haldol but more _real_. “You don’t want to stay with some old drooling guy. You’ll wake up one day and not be sure if the guy sleeping next to you is dead or alive.”

Clay grins, all teeth, and scratches at his stubble. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes, but Tom’s used to that. Tom thinks of the damage those teeth could do and he feels his pulse quicken. He purses his lips, and Clay catches himself staring at how perfectly formed those lips are. He noticed, before, Tom’s sharp cheekbones and pink, perfect mouth, but he doesn’t quite catch how fucking _gorgeous_ Tom’s eyes are until Tom looks at him then, the sunlight from the window hitting his face and making his eyes shine like nothing Clay’s ever seen before. “Come on,” Tom says then. “I’ll teach you about food in the psych ward.”

It seems pointless for now, Clay figures, to correct him.

*

After dinner there’s the usual dosing, and then he and Clay find a spot on one of the couches to watch TV. Clay tells him, then, that TV was better in the last place, but the Haldol hits him hard as the first time. He has a big stupid grin on his face and for once, Tom smiles right along with him. They’re not talking, and neither of them are really here – this place contains their bodies, not their minds, which is why Tom walks the mines like a ghost every night. Which is why Clay catches sight of his sister, just for a second, as his eyes close. They’re not talking, but Clay’s leg is pressed against his and his elbow bumps Tom a couple of times when he reaches up to shove that mess of brown hair out of his face. He apologizes both times. Tom just leans closer.

*

There are more bed checks, with Clay being the new guy, but Tom sleeps anyway. It hardly feels like sleep, anymore, with the way his nightmares exhaust him. He runs, the man in the mask chasing him, blood of all his friends all over the guy’s hands. He runs and there’s dust in his lungs and blood dripping off his own hands and there’s no light, here; all of the lamps have been smashed. He hears footsteps and then _feels_ it, a hand on his shoulder and then –

“Hey, man. Wake up. It’s okay.”

He twists, legs too bound by sheets to run, but then he sees the dark of the room and the moon coming through the window and –

And he feels Clay’s hand on him, rubbing his arm and shoulder, and he hears Clay telling him, “Calm down. I got you.” Clay’s been awake for an hour at least; the Haldol knocked him out fast but didn’t keep him that way, and Tom’s been moaning and breathing hard for half that. He finally got up when Tom started shouting.

Tom believes Clay immediately, though there’s no real reason to do so. Clay’s jaw ticks as he looks down at him; he has his bottom lip between his teeth again. His eyes look different, now, like he actually belongs in this place. Tom doubts it’s just the drugs.

After he untangles himself from the stiff, light blue hospital sheets, Tom sits up. “I warned you, man,” he says.

“I guess you did,” Clay says. He watches Tom, watches as his breathing slows down, watches the steady rise and fall of the guy’s chest. There’s enough moonlight to see all of Tom’s freckles, to see Tom’s dilated pupils and the stubble on his jaw and the pulse throbbing on his neck. He lets his hand drop away from Tom, but stays standing there with his legs touching the side of his bed. “So,” he says, “what do you dream about?”

Tom shrugs, clears his throat. A million answers catch there like dust, but he swallows each one and says, “I, uh. I don’t know if you really…”

“That bad, huh?”

Tom looks up at him, eyes bright and green and so vulnerable, right now, that Clay almost takes a step back. Looking at Tom makes him forget where he is, but at the same time it makes it all too clear. He tells himself it’s probably nothing, but no one dreams like this for _nothing_. In the moonlight Tom is even paler than Clay remembers from before, and he thinks if he needed to (if he wanted to) he could sit and count every individual freckle. Tom’s jaw shakes, almost imperceptibly (but Clay’s watching too closely, as he has been since he woke up an hour ago, and he’d like to say it’s because sleeping next to someone now makes him nervous, but –), as he finally speaks.

“I saw something,” Tom says, and he doesn’t mention how he _still_ sees things, how the man in the mask finds him every night. How sometimes he’s not even asleep when it happens.

“You saw something.” Clay puts his hand on Tom’s shoulder again, and he’s not sure whether it’s to hold himself up or keep Tom here. “Look,” he says, “if you need to talk about it, I’m…”

“No.” His voice is rough, raw, but not from the shouting that drove Clay over here. Tom shakes his head, violently. It’s all there; he could open his mouth and it would pour out, but he won’t let it. If he lets it out, it will always be there. He can’t kill it, here (anywhere) but he can try. He can pretend to.

“Okay,” Clay says, and holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay.” He watches Tom, watches each time Tom swallows, watches those bright green eyes watch _him_. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, exactly – he’s on little sleep and Haldol; he’s staring at some mental patient who is so gorgeous and lost he doesn’t even know what to _do_ with himself; he _is_ a mental patient as of twelve hours ago – but the words just slip out. Before he’s had a chance to even tell them to one of the _trained professionals_ here, he says, “I saw something, too.”

When Tom looks up at Clay he looks younger, curious, and yet – hungry. Clay knows he shouldn’t, that being too friendly gets him in trouble (gets him watching nice girls die, gets him _here_ ), but with a look from Tom he sits down on the bed.

“I saw something awful,” Clay continues, and Tom moves closer, although even with Clay speaking this quietly Tom can hear him perfectly. “I saw… I saw people get killed. _Mutilated_. Just… torn apart, you know?” He stares into Tom’s eyes and Tom _knows_ , and he shivers. He reaches out, can’t help himself, and puts his hand on Clay’s arm to tell him _keep going_.

Clay feels the words pour out, speech he hasn’t had since before _any_ of this happened, since before his mom died, since before he went back _home_. “There was so much blood,” he says, remembering the absolute _stench_ of it, the smell filling his nostrils even as pure panic took over. “There were so many _awful_ things, like you can’t even… And I was the only one who,” Clay swallows. Tom’s eyes are huge, are so fixed on him that it makes him stop short. Something tells him he doesn’t need to keep going, anyway. They’re so close he can feel Tom’s breath on him.

“I’m sorry,” Tom says, although he’s not at all. He thinks about the blood, about Clay running from all of it and coming here, and his heart pounds. His mind races. His cock hardens in his thin hospital pajamas.

“Yeah,” Clay says. He puts his other hand on top of Tom’s, and if the desire in Clay’s eyes isn’t quite the same as what Tom feels, can’t be for the same _reason_ , Tom takes what he can.

“Look,” Tom murmurs, though the pounding of his heart deafens him to his own words, “I’m sorry to keep you up, man.” He isn’t. At all.

“It’s fine,” Clay says, and he means a lot more. His other hand moves, now. He can’t figure out a reason for it, other than Tom’s mouth, his eyes, _everything_ is driving him crazy – whatever that means, here. Tom’s moving even closer, no space between them, and Clay’s working the little buttons on Tom’s pajama shirt, and just before he kisses him, Clay murmurs against Tom’s mouth, “I don’t sleep much anymore, anyway.”

For Clay, for a minute, it all disappears. He stops thinking about his dead sister and all that he saw, and focuses instead on the way Tom’s mouth moves on his, shy but hungry, hesitant but thorough. Tom fumbles with the stupid hospital pajamas and finally gets Clay’s off, and Clay’s half hard before Tom’s even kneeling before him, before he even feels Tom’s breath on his cock.

“Fuck,” Clay says, trying to keep his voice down – the last bed check was twenty minutes ago; the next can’t be _that_ far away, but then Tom gets his mouth around him and any thoughts of _nurses_ disappear along with his dead sister. There’s no beast running through his mind after him, just Tom’s mouth and tongue and warm fingers gripping him, pushing and pulling him toward what he hasn’t had in he doesn’t even know how long. If he ever had it.

He didn’t even know he wanted it, wanted anything _like_ it, until this afternoon. It’s been a few hours, not even a day, but he remembers places like this – time passes differently, and old rules don’t apply. Nothing matters here except that he comes with Tom’s mouth around him, with his hand gripping the thin bristles of Tom’s hair, with his hospital pajamas around his knees and his eyes fixed on Tom’s.

After the next bed check, Tom comes with Clay’s big hand around his cock, with Clay’s tongue fucking his mouth while he gets on top of Tom and pulls everything out of him, all of the nightmares and the doubts and the fear of going crazy. He knows he is, because more than anything – when Clay gets back into his own bed to await the next check, when Clay finally drifts off, breathing easily – he doesn’t want the nightmares to stop. He wants them, wants the blood on his hands and the dreams of destroying anything, anyone, because they mean Clay will save him. It’s not his fault if things get so twisted up, if Clay comes to mean the nightmares the way that the nightmares mean Clay.

It’s not his fault, really, that if each night he when wakes up and Clay’s standing up he asks for more, more about Jason, more about the dead kids and how they died. If Clay decides to tell him, to whisper about the kids getting torn apart like rag dolls, picked off like animals, while he fucks Tom on the stiff sheets of the almost-too-small twin bed that creaks with each forward motion – it isn’t his fault, that Tom enjoys it.

It’s a lie, but it makes no difference. There is one truth, for Tom: there’s nothing beautiful in this place, nothing he really ever wanted to hold onto, but now there’s Clay.

*

Time passes like nothing here, slips by like the pills he lets dissolve in his system, but Tom measures nights by the stories he collects from Clay. Clay doesn’t keep track of time at all, really. He learns the place quickly, through Tom’s help, but it takes more than that for him to figure out _Tom_.

What he knows: Tom likes everything best face-to-face, likes grabbing fistfuls of Clay’s hair any time Clay goes down on him. Tom digs his nails into Clay like he can’t help himself – Clay’s pretty sure that Tom can’t help himself at all -, and if Clay listens close enough he can hear the filthy words spouting from Tom’s lips, words that should probably make him pause but only make him go faster. But when they kiss, when he first reaches out and touches his mouth to Clay’s, it’s still shy and quiet as the first time, some eye of the storm.

He still doesn’t know what wakes Tom up each night, but it hardly matters. It’s all so fucked up; it’s more trouble than Clay’s ever been in, fucking some mental patient, but it starts to matter a lot less with his head between Tom’s legs, with his tongue licking patterns into Tom’s inner thighs. Time with Tom drags everything out of him, everything the drugs can’t numb him of, and for a while that seems to be all he needs.

And if Tom looks at him for too long sometimes, with an expression like Clay’s only seen in movies, then Clay ignores it. This isn’t the real world; it’s all okay. If Tom’s eyes get so desperate sometimes when Clay comes to him, when Clay lies down on the bed and whispers tales of Jason into his ear, hoping it will cure them both through some kind of twisted catharsis, then Clay just reminds himself that nothing they do here is real. When Tom holds on too tightly as Clay fucks into him, leaves half-moon marks on Clay’s arms hips back, he just chalks it up to passion – nothing more.

It’s not the truth, but he’s supposed to be getting better here. Not worse. Not so caught up in the way Tom moves under him, not like some mental patient but like the best fuck Clay’s ever had; not so caught up in the way Tom smiles at him, sometimes, in the dayroom, the sunlight illuminating freckles smile _eyes_ and erasing everything else this place represents.

What he knows: his name falls off Tom’s lips like some kind of prayer, like after all he’s seen (they’ve seen) there could be any kind of God left. What he knows: he minds the insomnia less and less.

*

For Tom, every day isn’t the same, anymore. Things aren’t _simple_ , but it isn’t such a bad thing. The dreams get worse, or better. In his dreams he’s a masked man hunting someone whose face he can’t see, ghost hunting ghost, but it all feels distant next to Clay’s hands on his skin, Clay’s cock taking him hard and fast. The doctors load him with pills, like _that_ might make him talk, but the only things he feels are stiff sheets warm hands hard cock sharp teeth soft lips.

It’s all he wants; it’s all he thinks about. This place holds back the beast in him, in all of them, but Clay brings it to the surface. Tom isn’t so delusional, that he thinks Clay could really pull it entirely _out_ – but he feeds it. He keeps it happy.

Clay leaves teeth marks on his neck and Tom keeps his hand there all the next day, not to hide it but to confirm its reality. The same small smile stays on his lips, even when Clay leaves for two hours (for an eternity) for his psych evaluation. The nurses pat his shoulder and tell him the drugs are doing wonders. He goes back to the room (their room) and jerks off into the sheets, then falls asleep and dreams of Clay on his knees before him, of a blade in his own hand. Clay returns and wakes him up, and Tom starts breathing properly again. That happy, Clay-driven grin returns to his face and Clay puts an arm around his shoulder as he leads him to the caf to get something to eat. “Can’t get well on an empty stomach,” Clay teases, and Tom laughs for too long. He touches the marks on his neck and wonders if anyone’s ever killed, just to keep something like this.

*

Clay gets better. Tom doesn’t. In the end, it’s really that simple.

There’s Tom, here, but here there are also drugs. Doctors. Outside of their one room, where Clay slams Tom into the bed, the room where Tom sucks on Clay’s bottom lip until Clay loses all feeling in it, there’s a world of doctors and nurses, trying to help them.

It isn’t their fault, if they only succeed in helping Clay.

Clay hides it, at first. He’s still an insomniac and he still _wants_ , so it’s easy. But it’s not that simple – there’s no way Tom doesn’t notice the way the nurses look at him, the ones who know he’s getting out in a month.

They can all tell, and after a while, so can Tom.

Tom still dreams, but now the dreams change. In them, he has the tools and there’s blood on his hands, but it isn’t the blood of strangers – it isn’t even the blood of his friends.

It’s Clay’s blood and it’s Clay, withering beneath him, fighting for his life. There’s sweat on Clay’s brow and blood on Clay’s t-shirt – his blood, Tom’s blood, _someone’s_ blood – and fire in his eyes like he’s about to come.

Nobody _wins_ anything, and these are still nightmares. They are, because even when Tom wakes up so hard that he can barely see Clay in front of him, _real_ Clay, not _dream_ Clay, Clay is still going to leave him. Leave him here, to his nightmares/dreams/fantasies. Tom doesn’t even think, that it’s unfair because he’s been here longer – he would give Clay that, would give him anything, and none of _that_ matters to him. He just thinks of the ache in his chest, of the craving that Clay feeds, of the way Clay grunts Tom’s name into his ear – and how all that’s going to go, soon.

Clay doesn’t expect Tom to be happy about any of it. That’s not how things work, here. Their relationship didn’t blossom, didn’t germinate like love in a Hallmark movie. It’s not even a tragic fucking love story. It’s something that happened, in this world outside the world, and so it should be fine.

But that doesn’t stop Tom from killing Clay in his dreams.

He doesn’t know if it’s better, but when he kills Clay, it always takes longer. The dreams about the mines, about all of his friends, about complete strangers or the ones Clay saw die – everyone goes quickly. There’s a scream, and there’s blood, and then Tom’s stepping over them as if they were no more than meat puppets.

It’s nothing like that, when he kills Clay.

Each day, Clay gets a little better. Some nights he’s actually asleep before Tom wakes up from some nightmare; Tom crawls over to him and Clay smiles tiredly while Tom kills him more and more brutally in his dreams. While Tom twists knives into Clay’s back and watches blood trickle down Clay’s spine, Clay kisses him tenderly, presses himself in slowly, now that there’s time – now that he’s been here long enough that the space between bed checks leaves them _that_.

They up Tom’s medication, and he swallows the pills down with more vigor than ever before, as though he might really get the bad men out of his head. As though he might remove himself.

But the drugs, like this place, aren’t enough to fix him. They can only contain him. The beast can hide again, but it won’t go away.

And Clay’s leaving, anyway.

Clay finally tells him, two weeks before departure, that he’s getting out – that the one-year-six-month stint has prepared him to go back to the world. Clay has no idea what that means, actually, but he knows he isn’t meant to remain among these vegetables. There’s something inside of him, now, from what he saw, something that will never really leave him – but he can’t hide here. Not forever.

So two weeks before, instead of telling Tom the last of what he can about Jason – he ran out of details long ago; he’s lost track of what happened and what he made up and maybe _that’s_ why he’s doing so well – he tells him about getting out. Tom doesn’t ask where he’ll go, or what he’ll do. He figures to people in here, none of that matters.

He still fucks Tom until Tom has to shove a hand over his perfect mouth to keep quiet, still stays too close in the cafeteria rec area art room, but he stops leaving fingerprints on Tom’s hips. He’s getting out.

*

There’s no kiss goodbye when Clay leaves, no _I’ll see you_ or _good luck_. Tom gets down on his knees one last time and it’s the closest to _goodbye_ they can get. It’s nothing so trite as the real world, but Tom can’t call it simple – he can maybe call it, there with his knees digging into the linoleum and Clay’s hand on the back of his head, the closest he gets, as well, to begging.

Clay leaves the same way he came, with just a backpack and a couple of bucks in his wallet. If his eyes look haunted still, if something isn’t entirely right, Tom hardly notices. He’s too focused on the retreat itself, on the empty bed next to his. He watches from the window as Clay gets into the cab, and he thinks of all the ways he might have made Clay stay. He thinks he should have held Clay by the throat, instead.

Clay leaves, but nothing’s the same. Nothing’s the way it was before he arrived. The drugs don’t work any better, but Tom stops having nightmares. There’s no revelation; no therapy that brings him around; he just stops sleeping, period. He decides that he’s going to get out, too.

It’s simple, really. One Tuesday in March, a month after Clay takes off, Tom has his usual psych evaluation and this time, for the first time in almost six years, he talks. He tells them what he saw. And it doesn’t help – he still knows what he’d find in his sleep, if he slept anymore – but it works toward getting him out of here. All it takes is a few words, and they all praise him for opening up. They praise themselves and the drugs, and after six years of this place he’s finally going to leave.

They release him on a Monday, and the sun is high in the sky and reflecting off the cab windows. The air is cool and fresh and for a second, Tom feels half-sane, like this could really be okay. He sleeps soundly in the cab, because there are no nightmares, anymore, in his head.

Clay is gone, and so are the nightmares. He opened his mouth and let them both run free. The air is cool and the sun beats down on the cab, and when Tom catches sight of himself in the window, the beast is right there beside him.


End file.
